TL-191: After the End
- Thread starter David bar Elias
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Joshua Blackford had a fairly quiet post-presidency, outside of speaking at major Democratic Party events, including several presidential conventions. Blackford had a cordial relationship with most of his successors. The Blackford Presidential Library was opened in 1989, which also honors both of his parents. This presidential library is located in New York City.
Blackford had three children: two daughters and one son. Ultimately, none of his children went into politics, even as they continued to vote for the Democratic Party.
Joshua Blackford died in 2015, of old age.
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Say, what made Joshua Blackford become a Democrat instead of a Socialist like his parents. How did his mother and rest of his family react to him becoming such? Are his policies as a Democratic president any different from that of a Socialist? Is he one of the most left wing members of the party? Considering the Democrats are basically the conservative party but with, IMV, sizable center and center-left factions.
I will begin my answer with a caveat: I am unsure of the precise details of the British political situation in TTL prior to the rise of the Conservative-Silver Shirt coalition in the 1930s. I am making the assumption that domestic politics in the United Kingdom was affected by the military and territorial losses in the First Great War, along with postwar economic problems and labor unrest. Other interpretations of TTL’s careers of Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, and Bernard Law Montgomery may exist in the “Filling in the Gaps” or TL-191 thread. The following represents, then, one speculative scenario for the public figures named in your question.
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Stanley Baldwin had a roughly similar political career, until the immediate years following the First Great War. In TTL, the British military defeat in the FGW in 1917 also led to the collapse of the wartime coalition between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. In the first postwar general election, the Labour Party, led by William Adamson, ultimately triumphed. However, Adamson’s government was weakened by continuing economic problems and growing unrest from the trade unions. The rule of law in Britain was also negatively affected in the immediate postwar years by the appearance of far-right groups, some of which were also led by FGW veterans. Some of these groups were utilized as strike-breakers, while other groups of this nature engaged in street fighting with anyone and any group imagined as an enemy.
During this time, Stanley Baldwin achieved leadership over the Conservative Party, and ultimately led the party to victory in a general election called in 1923. Baldwin focused on attempting to stabilize the British economy, made worse in TTL by reparations demands by the Central Powers. One of the seminal events of Baldwin’s tenure in government was the General Strike of 1925, analogous to our world’s General Strike of 1926.
As in our world, this General Strike affected the coal industry and transport, and was sparked by plans to reduce the wages of coal miners. Unlike in our world, the General Strike of 1925, which resulted in several weeks of disruptions to transportation in the United Kingdom in April-May 1925, was accompanied by a not-insignificant level of violence, both due to the responses by the police towards striking workers, and due to clashes throughout the country between far-right and far-left groups. As in the case of a number of interwar far-right groups, many far-left groups engaged in street violence were originally founded by veterans.
Baldwin’s government was gravely weakened by the 1925 General Strike, with Baldwin himself increasingly blamed by the general public for a breakdown of law and order, persistent economic problems, and the sense of national humiliation. Baldwin also faced a groundswell of anger from within his own party, with some Conservative figures in the government and the media accusing him of failing to take harsher action against the trade unions involved in the General Strike. Some historians have claimed that Winston Churchill’s own radicalization, and subsequent willingness to align himself with the Silver Shirts, can be dated to this period. Baldwin, weakened politically, led the Conservatives to defeat in the general election of 1927, to a resurgent Labour Party led by Ramsay MacDonald.
Baldwin attempted to maintain leadership of the Conservative Party as leader of the opposition to MacDonald’s government. However, he faced constant criticism from a growing number of far-right backbenchers from his own party. The stabilization of the British economy in the late 1920s, facilitated by the renegotiation of reparations to the Central Powers, led some in Britain to speculate that the Labour Party would hold power for some time to come.
It was during this era that Oswald Mosley successfully orchestrated the merger of a large number of smaller far-right groups into the Silver Shirt party.
The 1931 Business Collapse fatally weakened the Labour government. However, Baldwin would be unable to take advantage of these political developments. He was ousted as leader of the Conservative Party in an MP-led revolt led by Winston Churchill, who subsequently made the fateful decision to ally the Conservatives with the Silver Shirts, who appeared to enjoying a surge of support in traditional Conservative constituencies.
Baldwin resigned from Parliament following his ouster as party leader, and played no role in the Conservative-Silver Shirt Coalition that emerged following the 1932 general election. He grew to be horrified by the measures taken by the Coalition against its claimed “enemies” and the sharp curtailment of political freedoms. Baldwin kept his own views private. He died in 1947, and was said to have been a broken man, in the wake of Britain’s defeat in the SGW and the three German superbombings.
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Neville Chamberlain’s political career diverged from OTL beginning in the FGW, when he was not offered a position by the wartime coalition. However, he was still ultimately elected to Parliament, and eventually became a close ally of Stanley Baldwin. Chamberlain focused on issues relating to public health, but never became Minister of Health. Chamberlain’s political career collapsed in 1931, with Baldwin’s ouster as leader of the Conservatives, resulting in his retirement from politics. Unlike Baldwin, Chamberlain did not keep his objections to the Coalition, and its increasingly repressive domestic policies, private. Chamberlain was not arrested, but did receive a not-so-subtle warning that remaining in Britain would be detrimental to his health. Chamberlain left Britain with his family for New Zealand, where he died in 1940.
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In the TL-191 series, Lord Halifax is shown to be the British ambassador to the Confederacy. After the end of the SGW, Halifax’s political career ended. The US government, under the Dewey administration, initially considered formally requesting the British government that Halifax be handed over, after learning of his role in facilitating the Confederacy’s superbomb project, but ultimately decided against such a request. Halifax did write a memoir of his time as ambassador to the CSA, which was surprisingly scathing both of Featherston and the CSA in general; Halifax concluded this memoir by stating that it had been a great mistake for Britain ever to have supported the CSA in any capacity. Lord Halifax died in 1959.
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Bernard Law Montgomery survived the FGW. His experiences during the war convinced him of the need for the British military to modernize its doctrines concerning armored warfare. His military career would later be bolstered by the policies of the Conservative-Silver Shirt Coalition, which pursued a policy of rearmament and actively sought out innovative military commanders. By the time war broke out in 1941, Montgomery found himself as one of the British frontline commanders on the Western Front. His successes on the battlefield in the Low Countries and in north Germany did not go unnoticed by his superiors, though he was not ultimately put in a position of supreme command. Montgomery did himself no political favors by publicly objecting to the Entente attack on Norway, believing it to be a waste of resources. While Montgomery was not arrested due to this objection, he was removed from his position as a frontline commander and demoted. Montgomery found himself leading his men on a steady retreat from north Germany and through the Low Countries. The forces under his command were among those evacuated home to Britain following the end of the war in 1944. Montgomery was subsequently discharged from the British Army. However, his military career was not over; Montgomery accepted an offer by an Australian representative of a position of command in the Australian military. Montgomery, along with a number of other recruited ex-British military commanders, would play a key role in Australia’s postwar program of military expansion and modernization, amidst fears of a future Japanese invasion.
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Herbert Chapman’s life and career was not dramatically different from OTL until the 1930s, when he did not die of pneumonia, as in our world. He continued to enjoy a successful career as manager of the Arsenal Football Club. Tragically, he was killed in 1944, in the German superbomb attack on London.
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Matt Busby’s family immigrated to Australia in the mid-1920s, following the 1925 General Strike and related political violence. He eventually found work in an arms factory, where he remained until the end of the SGW. His talents in organization and management did not go unnoticed, and he was among those recruited to work in the Oceania arms manufacturing company. He rose through the ranks at Oceania, and eventually served on the company’s board of directors, before his retirement in 1989.
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William Shankly’s analogue in TTL served in the Royal Air Force. After the end of the SGW, he accepted an Australian offer of recruitment into the Australian Air Force. He was retired from active military service, however, by the time of the Fourth Pacific War in 1967. A lifelong football enthusiast, Shankly jumped at the opportunity to work in the front office for the South Melbourne Football Club (the Swans), his adopted football team.
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In TTL, Joshua Blackford’s political alignment was due to a combination of factors. After the end of the SGW, he was among those who blamed Al Smith and the Socialist Party for emboldening Featherston by allowing for the three plebiscites. Blackford, who had an active interest in military developments, was also enthusiastically supportive of the Dewey-Truman administration’s new defense policies and reforms.
Joshua Blackford’s activism and participation in politics as a Democrat did cause strain between him and his family, although his mother, Flora, privately accepted his decisions and never considered disowning or denouncing him. Joshua Blackford would always respect his mother for her political stamina and did her prewar warnings of the threat posed by Featherston’s CSA.
Blackford, both as a senator from New York and as President, would best be described as a centrist in terms of his policy alignments, with an active interest related to all issues related to defense policies. Blackford’s Vice President, James Rhodes, was picked in part to assuage the more conservative elements of the Democratic Party.
Would you say the current South has a lot of immigrants and such as a legacy of the encouragement to move into the region to increase the population and keep it stable?
Also are there people who deny "The Destruction"? Are they treated and thought of similarly to OTL Holocaust deniers?
I imagine Destruction-denial would be treated even more severely, given that the crime against humanity occurred on US soil. Sort of like how in our world's US, neo-Nazis can usually spout hate provided it doesn't cross into violence, but in Germany flying a Nazi flag is illegal, full stop. If I had to guess, this world's America would be more like OTL Germany.
It occurred on future US soil though, during that time those areas were not under US jurdistication.
Does it matter? Besides, the US always considered the CS breakaway states anyways rather than a real country. I can't even recall if they ever had embassies at each other's capitals.
They did. I remember reading that in "How Few Remain" one of the CS president's conditions for peace was recognition of the CSA. There was also a line in "In at the Death" where potter reflects, that something about like "for the first time since the early days of the Lincoln administration, the US flag flew in places other than the embassy"
I stand corrected but the point still stands that the US would never see the CSA as a equal worthy of being a nation, especially once Remembrance came into being after the Second Mexican War. The fact that the Destruction was enacted on future US territory wouldn't matter, anti-Confederate laws in the style of OTL Germany's anti-Nazi laws would most certainly be on the books in America.
Makes sense. At least there isn't any support like OTL USA where people from the midwest and north wave Confederate flags.
There were efforts by the US government in TTL to encourage outsiders to move to the former CSA, including encouraging new immigrants. Later in the 20th Century, the various state governments of the Midsouth (the former CSA minus Sonora, Chihuahua, and Cuba) also attempted to attract new residents by almost any means necessary.
However, efforts at both the national and state level to boost the population of the Midsouth did not succeed, outside of certain areas that benefited from the presence of high paying jobs or already had strong local tourism industries. Beginning in the 1980s, there was a large scale migration of residents from the states of the Midsouth to other areas of the US for economic reasons.
The efforts, such as they were, by the US government to encourage new immigrants to settle in the Midsouth failed due to most immigrants rejecting the offer of government-supported homesteading in favor of moving to the major cities.
Unfortunately those kinds of people do exist in TTL. In the USA, these people tend to be very marginalized, given that most of the people who engage in the denial of the Destruction also tend to be apologists for Featherston and the Freedom Party-ruled CSA. While it technically isn’t illegal in the USA in 2021 to publicly deny the Destruction, it also isn’t illegal, for example, for an employer to immediately fire someone who engages in such behavior. Those who publicly engage in the denial of the Destruction also tend to be subject to investigations by the Bureau of Investigation, given the strong overlap between denial of the Destruction and support for the Freedom Party’s ideology.
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I guess this is something to be expected.
I remember e.g. the Viva California timeline from Wikia which is maybe from the mid-2000s at the latest (POD: American-Mexican War is lost because Zachary Taylor is already dead, IIRC.) and one page there read "while the USA and Stalin differed on economics, they didn't differ on subjugated minorities" or something similar and that it's the war budget that's used to relocate Southerners to other places inside the enlarged USA and that it's cheaper than constant war and more human than Stalin's purgers and it's nicknamed the "Assyrian method" what with relocating nations inside an empire as an attempt to consolidate the lands and integrate the people into one nation. I don't remember if anything similar was envisioned in TL-191 or this very scenario, but I guess that relocating Afro-Americans from the "Midsouth" to Haiti is symptomatic enough that the USA didn't even try to disperse white Southerners from the regained territories.
If you look at places where e.g. ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from after World War II, you see a similar development. There's always the problem how to distribute people into a land that somehow got void of people and you need to force some luck to resettle the place. When Czechoslovakia redistributed former German property in the Sudetenland, entitled persons (or whoever was encouraged to be there) got their new property assigned by sortition. And yet you still had the problem that the new population was maybe three quarters of the previous one. Structually strong places (read: cities with a strong industrial base) had even more people than before the expulsions whereas other places (hamlets and the like) were often surrendered or just survived as weekend settlements. Poland was an even more special case, entire institutions were moved e.g. from Lemberg/Lwów/L'viv to Breslau/Wrocław and whereas you can say that something like sortition also happened in the "regained territories" of former German East Elbia, it's telling that one of the first things Gomulka did as the new first secretary of the PZPR was stopping the collectivization of agriculture and making the homesteaders proper owners of their land. It was successful enough that there are now more Poles in these lands than there ever used to be Germans, but this was a deliberate colonization attempt and followed more of a nationalist logic than a communist one.
Homesteads sound romantic and nostalgic, but the reality isn't. In the end, there's no alternative to put up with urbanity and putting up highways, LRTs and BART-style commuter systems. If people in my native Germany say they want to live in the countryside, they still want fibre and, yes, a reasonable commute to their swarm city they came from. A tram-train is a more sustainable homesteading policy than an actual homestead. I know because I inherited Grandpa's house which I live in and it's near an LRT station only opened in 2004.
On the post war era blamegame, so it seems, would the Democrats be hesitant to blame Herbert Hoover leading on the road to war and the eventually accept that fact? Based on the books, he was the one who went passed the point of no return by authorizing the CSA to rearm itself, as well as not allowing in any black refugees. He'd be doing austerity measures just like in our timeline and make the Great Depression worse. He also made tensions with the Mormons worse and basically killed reconciliation with them. Is he regarded worse than IOTL for that?
Oh, and not to poke too much, don't forget to do the next part of sci-fi writers bios--unless you're working on those.
Spekaing of Hoover, the second question was asked years ago but never answered:
Furthermore does he help to create something like a TL-191 version of the World Food Programme or do anything for hunger/famine relief post war? Or in charity at least? Based on the books, he gained prominence addressing the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and might've gained prominence beforehand due to hunger/famine relief during/after WWI that helped save many lives. So does he rehabilitate his image with that or do people think twice about him due to what happened during his presidency? What becomes of him in general?
Pierre Trudeau doesn’t exist in TTL.
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In TTL, in 2021, there is an international organization, the Central Friendship Circle, that is based around the historical relationship between the Socialist Party (United States), the Social Democratic Party (German Empire), and the major socialist parties from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, by 2021, other socialist/social democratic parties from other nations have a place in the Central Friendship Circle.
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The Social Democratic Party in Germany adopted an analogue to our world’s Godesberg Program in 1947.